About the Article

The newly published article, Crosswalks among stewardship maturity assessment approaches promoting trustworthy FAIR data and repositories, examines and outlines the commonalities and distinctions of three established data stewardship assessment approaches: i) CoreTrustSeal Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements (CTDRR); ii) NOAA/CICS-NC Data Stewardship Maturity Matrix (DSMM); and iii) FAIR Data Guiding Principles. A clear understanding of the crosswalks among these approaches is essential for (re)using them to cater to data stewardship needs at different scales, from examination of the trustworthiness of individual data objects right through to that of research data repositories.

Key Findings

Strong correlations are found in criteria covering data discovery, accessibility, interoperability, and usability due to the overlapping requirements of the approaches when it comes to the management of digital data objects. Through a comprehensive comparison of the three maturity approaches, we are able to highlight that the community stewardship practices and capabilities of Trustworthy Data Repositories support the FAIR Data Principles, as one might hope. Our study also reveals that the complexity of the approaches can lead to a large variety of inferred crosswalks among them.

About the Methodology

Each of the crosswalks was deliberated carefully among the authors and without self-imposed timelines. During a number of in-depth and lengthy discussions, we explored every perspective that our diverse backgrounds provided us until a consensus was reached. Our focus was on direct mappings, and thus we limited our attention to only the criteria definitions of the three approaches, avoiding consideration of other supporting guidance, which would have increased the potential for nuanced interpretations and led to many more subjective, inferred mappings.

About the Authors

Dr. Edmunds was integral in championing the CTDRR from its inception, and likewise was Dr. Peng for DSMM. Ms. Gross has experience from the applicant’s perspective for DSMM and CTDRR, as well as from the CTDRR reviewer's perspective. All three authors have been involved with the FAIR Principles through our work-related activities and participation in national and international working groups and publications.